It’s not exactly what Iowa Bob meant when he was always saying how Father lives in the future.”
“It’s a rather different future, Lilly,” I said.
“Lilly,” Franny said. “What’s ‘the green light,’ Lilly? I mean, for Father : what’s his green light, Lilly?”
“You see, Lilly,” Frank said, as if he were bored, “Gatsby was in love with the idea of being in love with Daisy; it wasn’t even Daisy he was in love with, not anymore. And Father hasn’t got a Daisy, Lilly,” Frank said, choking up just a little—because it had probably just occurred to him that Father didn’t have a wife anymore, either.
But Lilly said, “It’s the man in the white dinner jacket, it’s Father, he’s a Gatsby. ‘It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—’” Lilly quoted to us. “Don’t you see?” she shrieked. “There’s always going to be an It—and It is going to elude us, every time. It’s going to always get away,” Lilly said. “And Father’s not going to stop,” she said. “He’s going to keep going after it, and it’s always going to get away. Oh, damn it!” she howled, stamping her little foot. “Damn it! Damn it!” Lilly wailed, and she was off again, unstoppable—a match for Screaming Annie, who could only fake an orgasm; Lilly, we suddenly understood, could fake death itself. Her grief was so real that I thought Susie the bear was going to take the bear’s head off and pay a little human reverence, but Susie prowled through Frank’s room in her strictly bearish fashion; she bumped out the door, leaving us to deal with Lilly’s anguish.
Lilly’s Weltschmerz, as Frank would come to call it. “The rest of us have anguish,” Frank would say. “The rest of us have grief, the rest of us merely suffer. But Lilly,” Frank would say, “Lilly has true Weltschmerz. It shouldn’t be translated as ‘world-weariness,’” Frank would lecture us, “that’s much too mild for what Lilly’s got. Lilly’s Weltschmerz is like ‘world-hurt,’” Frank would say. “Literally ‘World’—that’s the Welt part—and ‘hurt,’ because that’s what the Schmerz part really is: pain, real ache. Lilly’s got a case of world- hurt,” Frank concluded, proudly.
“Kind of like sorrow, huh, Frank?” Franny asked.
“Kind of,” Frank said, stonily. Sorrow was no friend of Frank’s: not anymore.
In fact, the death of Mother and Egg—with Sorrow in Egg’s lap, and rising from the deep to mark the grave —convinced Frank to give up trying to properly pose the dead; Frank would give up taxidermy in all its forms. All manifestations of resurrection were to be abandoned by him. “Including religion,” Frank said. According to Frank, religion is just another kind of taxidermy.
As a result of Sorrow’s tricking him, Frank would come down very hard on belief of any kind. He would become a greater fatalist than Iowa Bob, he would become a greater nonbeliever than Franny or me. A near-violent atheist, Frank would turn to believing only in Fate—in random fortune or random doom, in arbitrary slapstick and arbitrary sorrow. He would become a preacher against every bill of goods anyone ever sold: from politics to morality, Frank was always for the opposition. By which Frank meant “the opposing forces.”
“But what exactly do these forces oppose, Frank?” Franny asked him, once.
“Just oppose every prediction,” Frank advised. “Anything anybody’s for, be against it. Anything anybody’s against, be for it. You get on a plane and it doesn’t crash, that means you got on the right plane,” Frank said. “And that’s all it means.”
Frank, in other words, went “off.” After Mother and Egg went away, Frank went ever farther away— somewhere—he went into a religion more vastly lacking in seriousness than even the established religions; he joined a kind of anti-everything sect.
“Or maybe Frank founded it,” Lilly said, once. Meaning nihilism, meaning anarchy, meaning trivial silliness and happiness in the face of gloom, meaning depression descending as regularly as night over the most mindless and joyful of days. Frank believed in zap! He believed in surprises. He was in constant attack and retreat, and he was equally, constantly, wide-eyed and goofily stumbling about in the sudden sunlight—tripping across the wasteland littered with bodies from the darkness of just a moment ago.
“He just went crazy,” Lilly said. And Lilly should know.
Lilly went crazy, too. She seemed to take Mother’s and Egg’s deaths as a personal punishment for some failure deep within herself, and so she resolved she would change. She resolved, among other things, to grow.
“At least a little,” she said, grimly determined. Franny and I were worried about her. Growth seemed unlikely for Lilly, and her strenuousness with which we imagined Lilly pursuing her own “growth” was frightening to Franny and me.
“I want to change, too,” I said to Franny. “But Lilly—I don’t know. Lilly is just Lilly.”
“Everyone knows that,” Franny said.
“Everyone except Lilly,” I said.
“Precisely,” Franny said. “So how are you going to change? You know something better than growing?”
“No. Not better,” I said. I was just a realist in a family of dreamers, large and small. I knew I couldn’t grow. I knew I would never really grow up; I knew my childhood would never leave me, and I would never be quite adult enough—quite responsible enough—for the world. The goddamn Welt, as Frank would say. I couldn’t change enough, and I knew it. All I could do was something that would have pleased Mother. I could give up swearing. I could clean up my language—which had upset Mother so. And so I did.
“You mean you’re not going to say ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ or ‘cock-sucker’ or even ‘up yours’ or ‘in the ear’ or anything, anymore?” Franny asked me.
“That’s right,” I said.
“Not even ‘asshole’?” Franny asked.
“Right,” I said.
“You asshole,” Franny said.
“It makes as much sense as anything else,” Frank reasoned.
“You dumb prick,” Franny baited me.
“I think it’s rather noble,” Lilly said. “Small, but noble.”
“He lives in a second-rate whorehouse with people who want to start the world over and he wants to clean up his language,” Franny said. “Cunthead,” she told me. “You wretched fart,” Franny said. “Beat your meat all night and dream of tits, but you want to sound nice, is that it?” she asked.
“Come on, Franny,” Lilly said.
“You little turd, Lilly,” Franny said. Lilly started to cry.
“We’ve got to stick together, Franny,” Frank said. “This sort of abuse is not helpful.”
“You’re as queer as a cat fart, Frank,” she told him.
“And what are you, honey?” Susie the bear asked Franny. “What makes you think you’re so tough?”
“I’m not so tough,” Franny said. “You dumb bear. You’re just an unattractive girl, with zits—with zit scars : you’re scarred by zits—and you’d rather be a dumb bear than a human being. You think that’s tough? It’s fucking easier to be a bear, isn’t it?” Franny asked Susie. “And to work for an old blind man who thinks you’re smart—and beautiful, too, probably,” Franny said. “I’m not so tough,” Franny said. “But I am smart. I can get by. I can more than get by,” she said. “I can get what I want—when I know what it is,” she added. “I can see how things are,” Franny said. “And you,” she said, speaking to us all—even poor Miss Miscarriage—“you keep waiting for things to become something else. You think Father doesn’t?” Franny asked me, suddenly.
“He lives in the future,” Lilly said, still sniffling.
“He’s as blind as Freud,” Franny said, “or he soon will be. So you know what I’m going to do?” she asked us.
